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According to a previously mentioned article here at The ThinkShop (tick here for previous article: https://policyabcs.wordpress.com/?s=PEW ), nearly 1 our of 5 people over 18 years of age are not online. This could be a number that stays significant as a segment of the general public is not able to or rejects out of hand going online. This is quite interesting since the paper media is increasingly readjusting to the online and social media trends and political campaigns, for example, are constantly trying to find special niches that will give candidates an edge. Public relations and marketing gurus are looking at surprising trends in paper media which have some players surviving at the top of, some say, the sinking heap and others hovering at the bottom.

In either case, the life of these pre internet behemoths will tell us much about how publics engage and respond to both the new media access opportunities and cling to the floating platforms most see as relics of the dying print and paper days.

“According to figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations posted today (11 October), September was a good month ABC-wise for the Guardian and Observer, with both titles seeing strong …”

The Pew Foundation has an impressive network of websites promoting socially relevant and timely research that looks at emerging social trends and challenges in the areas of technology, social media, religion, politics, and others… The most recent issue addressing internet use, one of the main areas that Pew supports, includes a survey on internet use. The survey is important because we know, for obvious reasons, much about people using the internet but not so much about those absent from cyberspace. The report gives us interesting data and analysis on the nearly fifth of persons 18 years or older who by choice or constraint are not going online. This trend is interesting given the current explosion of handheld devises that make the internet ubiquitous and internet able gadgets an increasingly unavoidable necessity.

As you have become accustomed, The Policy ThinkShop does the research for you and provides a friendly place where you can come back and discuss what you found useful and relevant in your daily musings and/or work.

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The full report is being provide here by The Policy ThinkShop. Enjoy: http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2013/PIP_Offline%20adults_092513_PDF.pdf

“As of May 2013, 15% of American adults ages 18 and older do not use the internet or email.

Asked why they do not use the internet:

34% of non-internet users think the internet is just not relevant to them, saying they are not interested, do not want to use it, or have no need for it.

32% of non-internet users cite reasons tied to their sense that the internet is not very easy to use. These non-users say it is difficult or frustrating to go online, they are physically unable, or they are worried about other issues such as spam, spyware, and hackers. This figure is considerably higher than in earlier surveys.

19% of non-internet users cite the expense of owning a computer or paying for an internet connection.

7% of non-users cited a physical lack of availability or access to the internet.

Even among the 85% of adults who do go online, experiences connecting to the internet may vary widely. For instance, even though 76% of adults use the internet at home, 9% of adults use the internet but lack home access. These internet users cite many reasons for not having internet connections at home, most often relating to issues of affordability—some 42% mention financial issues such as not having a computer, or having a cheaper option outside the home.”

Paper media has been king for centuries. But it has fundamentally and permanently changed with the advent of the keyboard. Access to the written word, and even writing and disseminating the written word is no longer the privilege of the few and mighty.

The relationship between the written word and the reader, long the nexus of intellectual, economic, political, religious and educational life, is being overcome by the notion of typing and reading digitally. The implications for big media, especially the newspaper network of previously influential business owners, are now increasingly clear. The implications for new media, talent development and recruitment are not so clear. Here in lies the needed awakening. Like the printing press, the keyboard with a little intellect behind it, can now make an incredible difference. Micro publishing and social media are only beginning to show this. There is much more to come. How do we prepare? How do we have this conversation?

Where does one go to school today to become a master blogger, a webpage maven or a social media ace? Literary pundits, internet bloggers and computer geeks have never been seen as part of the same endeavor much less products of the same school. Today’s public relations, marketing, business and public health schools better be taking notes, because literature and communication in general–of the paper and pen kind–are seriously being challenged by the keyboard and the web page relationship. Public relations, marketing and media campaigns of all kinds (public health, political and sports, to name a few) are also being tested as the internet is where consumers, with their keyboards and their internet participation, are increasingly focused. That connectedness of being able to buy, communicate and make decisions in real time is what trumps paper and traditional media.

The long dark night of the printing press and papers has now begun. The paper and magazine media that is not able to awaken to today’s technological realities will disappear into an endless morning of wondering and retooling–sure to deplete investors and formerly interested parties. Those who awaken, diversify and invest in the new brave world of megabytes, html and the cloud will survive and perhaps thrive. The internet of things is not likely to include newspapers and magazines made of pulp and ink. Intelligence, language and knowledge itself is changing. Big data, knowledge management and gorilla marketing have begun to fill the epicenter of the communications spectacle and paper media lays wet and lethargic on the familial driveway as Americans get their news from the passive TV tube and the new digital generation gets it on the computer, tablet, or the smart phone. The internet represents a new layer of the national economy that seems to pervade everything and is still transforming previously stable information when it was a commodity more easily controlled. At last social media seems to be placing the reader in the drivers seat but nobody seems to know who is “driving.” Publishers, advertisers and Madison Avenue seem to be playing catchup only to be perplexed by more change. The world is once again changing. How people think, read and work is being changed as well. Perhaps change does not describe the extent of what is happening. This time the world is transforming; and our ability to read about it is morphing as well. At last, today’s newspaper moguls may be going the way of the paper tiger. The connection with many publics is being weakened and may never be recuperated. Who will win the publics’ ears and minds in the coming digital decades?

Who will generate the content that will be needed to feed the insatiable, 24 hour social media machine? There was a time when the written word was locked on paper as an expensive commodity–only for the eyes of rulers, religious leaders, and the most wealthy. As time passed, and the Magna Carta, industrialization, the printing press, political parties, unionization, and urbanization, all served to create rule by the people and for the people, the written word became as omnipresent and ubiquitous as falling leaves in the American autumn. But media is no longer simply domestic. It is global and instantaneous… It is micro publishing gone wild!

Today the written word has become digital and the mechanization of the reading experience has rendered the delivery of news, and eventually education, instantaneous, inexpensive, and convenient. The top universities are experimenting with free online courses. Gone are the days when people had to wait for the morning paper. The digital word has become as prevalent and fast as the spoken word; yet more effective because an entire warehouse of it can be sent to one million people with a click and it can be stored in perpetuity in the most convenient and inexpensive of gadgets. The economic model of media distribution has changed in profound ways and the implications are not yet fully understood. Today, the paper media is about to go the way of the 8 track and the Philips Tube radio.

New media now defines what is seen, understood and perhaps acted on. It will definitely influence power relationships and governing itself. This also has implications for how the polity gets its news and how nation states are able to control information within its borders. The genie is out of the bottle–turning the populous into today’s version of “literati.” It’s fascinating to see how the written Magna Carta relied on men of power and influence while today’s newspapers struggle to survive pandering to the masses at the alter of populism. At last, more may not be more. What seems most important is the relationship between the written (typed) word and the reader. Take a look at all the notables and institutions mentioned in the Magna Carta:

The Magna Carta (The Great Charter)

“Preamble: John, by the grace of God, king of England, lord of Ireland, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and count of Anjou, to the archbishop, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, justiciaries, foresters, sheriffs, stewards, servants, and to all his bailiffs and liege subjects, greetings. Know that, having regard to God and for the salvation of our soul, and those of all our ancestors and heirs, and unto the honor of God and the advancement of his holy Church and for the rectifying of our realm, we have granted as underwritten by advice of our venerable fathers, Stephen, archbishop of Canterbury, primate of all England and cardinal of the holy Roman Church, Henry, archbishop of Dublin, William of London, Peter of …”

Access to the written word, and even writing and disseminating the written word is no longer the privilege of the few and mighty. Technology continues to transform how knowledge is developed and shared. This has tremendous implications for an educated populous that can perhaps sustain even a more enlightened and egalitarian Democracy than the one we enjoy today.

“The stunning announcement on Monday of the sale of The Washington Post to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos caught many off guard. The Post has been owned by the Graham family for 80 years. But recent years brought steep revenue and circulation declines and as chief executive Donald Graham put it in a letter to the staff, “the newspaper business continued to bring up questions to which we had no answers.” In Bezos, The Post—and a handful of smaller papers owned by the company—get an owner who is considered one of the most successful business and technology entrepreneurs in the country. Bezos is considered to have a strong understanding of audience needs and the financial wherewithal to tolerate sluggish revenue numbers, at least for a while. Still, the challenges are large and not unique to The Post. Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project, which has been tracking the industry for over a decade, puts the sale in context.”

Newspapers are intellectual, cultural and political communication tools that require cultural competencies that reflect the diversity of publics being addressed. Minority employment in daily newspapers has been woefully lacking in the past decade or so. Very little progress has been made since the early 19902 which shows that the numbers have not only fallen as a percent of the total workforce but in absolute quantity since in 1991 the survey measured more total minorities in newspapers (4,900) than we have today (4,700). The numbers are shameful whether we measure ratios or absolutes. This disparity is surely to follow the media workforce online and the band plays on?

For those of you who visit our blog (The Policy ThinkShop) regularly, you must have noticed that we often promote articles from the New Yorker magazine. Recently a well written article caught the eye of one of our researchers which was written by a young man (IAN CROUCH) about the pleasures and vagaries of reading. We thought it interesting because the writing seems mature and well thought out and greatly belies the relatively young age of the author. This juxtaposition of age and naiveté against the well written ideas and use of language by this otherwise young and relatively inexperienced fellow calls into question the veracity of the magazine as a source of reliable information, wit and wisdom for the more discerning reader.

Are we being naive ourselves because this article and its author’s product hint at entertainment and literary skill? They seem to do so without the import and weight that time and wisdom bring to the often important weekly topics that are assigned to young writes today. These are seemingly hurried assignments by magazine Execs that have to be creative and prolific at a rate only made possible by perhaps young and creative kids passing as the wise and testy intellectuals of yesterday’s paper media.

Read the article below and come back to the Policy ThinkShop

and tell us what you think…

“Part of my suspicion of rereading may come from a false sense of reading as conquest. As we polish off some classic text, we may pause a moment to think of ourselves, spear aloft, standing with one foot up on the flank of the slain beast. Another monster bagged. It would be somehow less heroic, as it were, to bend over and check the thing’s pulse. But that, of course, is the stuff of reading—the going back, the poring over, the act of committing something from the experience, whether it be mood or fact, to memory. It is in the postmortem where we learn how a book …”

We are now moving towards and perhaps will be living in “THE INFORMATION CAGE.” Like a reoccurring nightmare that we explain away only to find out we did not quite explain it away, George Orwell still haunts us…

Wikileaks is just the tip of the iceberg. And information security could send thousands of people to the Siberia equivalent of going to jail for talking, reading, or sharing information…. The lines are being drawn and stripes could be in your future…. The information age is now washing over us like a waterfall and we don’t remember or fully understand how it got his way… it is omnipresent, omnipotent, information that is… and at last, it has become dangerous….

What started as your kids chit chatting and “wasting time on their computer” is now one of the largest money making business in human history and is creating resources that are challenging the wold’s elite in philanthropy…. Such is the new “WWW” world our heads are in with our feet on the ground while we look up at a world that boggles (perhaps “googles”) the mind!

Mark Zuckerberg, 28, and Priscilla Chan, 27, gave 18 million shares of Facebook stock, valued at about $498.8-million, to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to support education and health programs.

This is the young billionaire’s second large donation. In 2010, he pledged $100-million to establish Startup: Education, a foundation to support programs working to improve public schools in Newark, N.J.

The explosive growth of social networking sites has been a significant contributor to the online search for news, with the percentage saying they saw news or news headlines on social networking sites the previous day increasing from 9% in 2010 to 19%.

The other factor driving an increase in the number of Americans who get news digitally is the greater use of mobile devices in recent years.

This has changed the landscape when it comes to how news is consumed. While the percentage of Americans who regularly go online for news – those who get news online three days a week or more – has not increased, those who regularly get news on a cell phone, tablet or other mobile device has nearly doubled since 2010, from 9% to 15%, and the number seeing news on social network sites three days a week or more has almost tripled, from 7% to 20%.

The fast growing use of mobile devices has raised questions about the impact on the consumption of news. Are people who own mobile technology getting more news now that they have more ready access to it? Or are they merely replacing one platform with another?

While most (55%) of tablet news users say the news they get on their tablet is replacing news they would have gotten in other ways, nearly as many (43%) say the news they get there is adding to the overall news they consume.

Looking at those who get news across four platforms — tablet, smartphone, laptop/desktop and print — a solid majority (58%) say the news they get from a tablet is adding to the overall amount of news they consume.

In addition, almost a third (35%) of tablet news users say they are spending more time getting news now that they have a tablet. That is nearly identical to the 30% who responded that way in 2011. Just 12% say they get less news now. Read more

Social media came to a much different initial verdict about the first presidential debate than did the early polls and the conventional press, according to an analysis of the conversation on Twitter, Facebook and blogs by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

On both Twitter and Facebook, the conversation was much more critical of Mitt Romney than it was of Barack Obama. And when the criticism of one candidate and praise of another are combined, the conversation on Twitter leaned Obama’s way. On Facebook it was something of a draw.

Only in blogs, which tended to offer more of a summary of the event than a moment-to-moment reaction, did the sentiment resemble that of instant polls or press analysis, which have tended to see Romney as having the better of the debate.

For both candidates in social media, however, praise of their performance in general was hard to come by.

Twitter

On Twitter, an examination of 5.9 million opinions posted from the beginning of the debate through the next morning finds more of the conversation leaned Obama’s way (35%) than Romney’s (22%). But those who favored Obama tweeted not so much to praise him as to criticize his opponent. Of the entire conversation, 9% praised the president and 26% was critical of Romney. Of those favoring Romney, 7% praised him and 15% criticized Obama.

Not every tweet about the debate was an evaluation of candidate performance. Another 17% of the conversation involved people offering jokes with no clear opinion about either contender. A smaller component of the conversation, 9%, involved people sharing information or news. And 16% of the conversation talked about other things, such as evaluating the moderator, Jim Lehrer, or people tweeting that they were watching the debate-or not watching.

If the conversation that did not evaluate the candidates is removed from the tally, the Twitter numbers would show 61% leaning Obama’s way and 39%, Romney’s.

The mainstream newspaper Maariv is on the verge of closing, apparently having lost a fierce 64-year contest against the populist Hebrew tabloid Yediot Aharonot. On Thursday, Haaretz, the flagship broadsheet …

THE most humble day of my life,” is how Rupert Murdoch, the boss of News Corporation, described his experience being excoriated by British parliamentarians in July 2011. Accusations of phone hacking, police bribery and negligence involving Mr Murdoch’s News …

In seemingly endless times of “trash talk” that led to an improbable and unpopular political victory, the newly minted president clamors: “Now arrives the hour of action.” Fleeting relief comes to the nation as the transition […]

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